The normal operation of a computing system may be greatly harmed by an infestation of malicious software, also referred to as “malware”. Malware is any software or program code that covertly or fraudulently infiltrates a computing system. Malware may refer to computer viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, adware, or other malicious code. A malware event may be any attempt by malware to stop, corrupt, or convert a file, a system registry, an application process, or other data or processing feature of the computing system. The malware event may be a successful or an unsuccessful malware attack. To protect a computing system, a user may implement a defensive product, such as a firewall, antivirus software, spyware monitors, and other protective software.
A computing system may encounter difficulties even beyond malware. A process of an application running in a reduced level of resource access may be easily stopped, corrupted or converted by malware, a user, or by an internal crash of the process. Once the process has been stopped by malware, the malware may tamper with the process and show the same user experience to the user. Thus, the user may not even realize that the process is not running. The user may unwittingly reveal confidential, private, or financially damaging information.
Further, an operating system may not support application recovery and restart (ARP). Thus, a crash in the process may kill the process without any resurrection. Thus, malware that kills a process may damage a computing system even if the malware fails to replace the process being presented to the user.